The ongoing miniaturization of multi-media devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) or mobile phones in recent years appears to be only bounded by the perceptual limits of the human user. This particularly applies to the design of the displays of multimedia devices, with a remarkable trend to increase the relative area of the device that is consumed by its display. However, the display sizes of, for example, hand-held devices are necessarily significantly smaller than the display sizes, for which content is usually designed. If for instance content of the World Wide Web (WWW), i.e. web pages formatted according to the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or derivatives thereof (such as Extensible HTML (XHTML)), is to be displayed on the display of a hand-held device, it has to be considered that these web pages normally have an original presentation size designed for portrayal on a computer monitor, the dimensions of which are often remarkably larger than the display dimensions of a hand-held device such as a mobile phone.
Viewing web pages on a small display requires horizontal and vertical scrolling with scroll bars, which is generally experienced as uncomfortable or even annoying for the user.
Consequently, most browsers that are installed in, for example, hand-held devices and provide for the interpretation of the web page content offer the possibility to view web pages in a format that is optimized for the display dimensions of the hand-held device. This is usually achieved by rendering the web page so that it fits the width of the device's display.
This method of rendering the page so that it fits the width of the device's display causes at least the following problems:
Rendered pages get very tall, so a lot of vertical scrolling is required.
The structure of the web page is not preserved well by the rendering process, for example form elements like input fields frequently get separated far away from each other if they are aligned using tables.
An original layout mode is required as an additional viewing method, as all the pages just do not convert usably into tall and narrow format.
In said original layout mode, the web page is displayed in its original presentation size, i.e. a size wherein objects of said web page have the size that is prescribed by the object format (e.g. image or text format) and/or the markup language. Even when such an original layout mode is provided by the browser, there arise further problems:
As the web page area is big, a lot of panning and zooming is needed to explore the entire content of the web page.
On a small display, it is difficult to figure out the structure of a large page, i.e. the viewer may lose an overview of the entire web page.
Text paragraphs in the original layout usually are wider than the display width, so that paragraphs in the original layout mode on a small display are often difficult to read.
Quite similar problems are encountered when instead of two-dimensional (2D) objects (such as pages), three-dimensional (3D) objects are to be presented on a display. Examples of such 3D objects are a 3D map of a town, for instance obeying the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), or a 3D calendar representation, wherein days, weeks, months or years may be represented by cubes that are accordingly positioned to each other. There currently exists no technique to clearly present such usually large 3D objects on a small display.